1. Field
The invention is in the field of methods and machines for extruding a chopped or ground meat material and dividing the extruded material transversely into pieces.
2. State of the Art
Machines are available for extruding a chopped or ground meat material into sausage casings to produce conventional sausages. There are also machines which extrude food products and cut the extruded column transversely into pieces. Such machines produce pieces of uniform size, shape, and weight.
It has been found that pieces of uniform size, shape, and weight are not desirable for certain uses. For example, in the production of sausage pieces for use as pizza topping it is desirable to have torn pieces that are randomly sized and shaped. In the many pizza parlors around the country and even in the mass production of frozen pizza, random sizing and shaping of sausage pieces have been heretofore accomplished by hand-plucking bits of sausage from a large mass of sausage meat. When machines have been used, the sausage pieces produced have been of uniform size and shape. Market surveys have shown that this detracts from marketability of frozen, sausage-topped pizzas.